American-Canadian Grace Scheele is an electroacoustic harpist and film composer based in Toronto. Her music hones minimalistic textures within noise landscapes – creating a sound that is “a pliable, fluid, continuum…that’s as beautiful as it is unconventional” (Canadian Music Centre).
Over the past few years Grace has emerged as a distinct voice within the Canadian landscape, interweaving an eclectic mix of cassette sampling and electronic effects with a thinly-veiled irreverence towards the pedal harp’s traditional sound. Having premiered her interdisciplinary audiovisual stage show not yr angel bby harpist to sold-out audiences during Open Ears’ 2022 Festival of Music and Sound, her upcoming EP landings sees this at-times ethereal at-times jarringly discomforting harpist stretching the harp’s sonic possibilities into territories sparse explored.
landings free dives into a grittier side of the pedal harp. Bowed, detuned motifs cascade into grinding mechanical noise all stacked within the sampled landscape of the Apollo 11 manned mission to the Moon. Sparse, ethereal melodic passages amass into chunks of ambient noise; finding peace amidst a surreal soundscape.
Scheele has toured internationally, including solo performances at the Canadian Music Centre, Music Gallery, Soundstreams, and Aga Khan Museum amongst improvising with Juno award-winning cellist Matt Brubeck, Casey Sokol, Stephen Nachmanovitch, and Dr. Kathryn Ladano. She has composed and premiered film scores during the Toronto International Film Festival’s Next Wave Festival in 2019-2020, winning Audience’s Choice for Best Score in 2019. She recently scored the short film Notes on a Performance by writer/director Jennifer Law-Smith which was a finalist in the Vancouver Independent Film Festival and Toronto Independent Film Festival of CIFT in 2021.
